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Waugh's Bag, Volume 6, Issue 14!

Waugh’s Bag

Volume 6, Issue 14!

“Invincible Comes To The Silver Screen!”

For lots of comic book fans, the best kept secret in comics is Invincible, the other long running comic book created by The Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman. While Walking Dead has gone on to become a massive pop culture success, longtime comic book readers silently watched and wondered, “What about Invincible?”

Well, Invincible’s time has come.

Last week, word broke that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the duo responsible for bringing Preacher to AMC last summer, will be writing, producing, and directing a movie based on Invincible. While it’s a strange duo to pick for this adaptation, their love of comics is pretty apparent when you watch Preacher. While the first season took some odd narrative choices when it came to adapting Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s classic comic, the tone and characters were pretty much spot on. In this regard at least, Invincible is in good hands.

While the prospect of an Invincible movie is pretty cool, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping that it was going to be a TV show or animated project instead. That being said, if this adaptation is done right, it could look like no other superhero movie before it. One of the key aspects of Invincible is that this is a superhero world where people die. Yes, many of them are superheroes, but unlike characters from Marvel or DC, when a character in Invincible dies, they are dead forever.Another aspect that sets the adventures of Mark Grayson apart from other superheroes is the fact that this comic is one of the bloodiest ones on the stands, despite what the brightness the covers may hint at. Ideally, an Invincible movie would have the look of a movie like Spider-Man Homecoming, but the violence of Logan. It’s a weird dichotomy, I know, but if Rogen and Goldberg pulled it off, it would be amazing.

But I do worry about adapting Invincible as a movie. The comic is 130 issues deep, so there’s no shortage of material to adapt. But the simple fact of trying to figure out just what to include is pretty daunting. Obviously they’ll choose to cover the first three trades worth of material for the first movie, which covers Mark Grayson getting his abilities, learning to be a superhero under his dad, and the inevitable twist that comes with it. But then where do you go if you get a sequel? The Viltrumite War? “Everyone Dies”? It’s not that different from adapting a superhero from the “Big Two”, I know, but one of the key appeals of Invincible is the fact that it goes into some pretty dark and realistic places, and I worry that some of that might get cut for the “cool action scenes” that the studio will want.

Regardless of how Rogen and Goldberg are going to adapt Invincible, the sheer fact that more people will be interested in the comic because of the movie is worth it to me. Invincible has been a series that has long been overlooked, and it’s finally time for it to get its own time in the spotlight. Here’s hoping it’s worth the wait.